Deprecated in 5.4.0.

The tribe node is deprecated in favour of Cross-cluster search and will be removed in Elasticsearch 7.0.

The tribes feature allows a tribe node to act as a federated client across
multiple clusters.

The tribe node works by retrieving the cluster state from all connected
clusters and merging them into a global cluster state. With this information
at hand, it is able to perform read and write operations against the nodes in
all clusters as if they were local. Note that a tribe node needs to be able
to connect to each single node in every configured cluster.

The elasticsearch.yml config file for a tribe node just needs to list the
clusters that should be joined, for instance:

tribe:
t1:
cluster.name: cluster_one
t2:
cluster.name: cluster_two

t1 and t2 are arbitrary names representing the connection to each
cluster.

The example above configures connections to two clusters, name t1 and t2
respectively. The tribe node will create a node client to
connect each cluster using unicast discovery by default. Any
other settings for the connection can be configured under tribe.{name}, just
like the cluster.name in the example.

The merged global cluster state means that almost all operations work in the
same way as a single cluster: distributed search, suggest, percolation,
indexing, etc.

However, there are a few exceptions:

The merged view cannot handle indices with the same name in multiple
clusters. By default it will pick one of them, see later for on_conflict options.

Master level read operations (eg Cluster State, Cluster Health)
will automatically execute with a local flag set to true since there is
no master.

Master level write operations (eg Create Index) are not
allowed. These should be performed on a single cluster.

The tribe node can be configured to block all write operations and all
metadata operations with:

tribe:
blocks:
write: true
metadata: true

The tribe node can also configure blocks on selected indices:

tribe:
blocks:
write.indices: hk*,ldn*
metadata.indices: hk*,ldn*

When there is a conflict and multiple clusters hold the same index, by default
the tribe node will pick one of them. This can be configured using the tribe.on_conflict
setting. It defaults to any, but can be set to drop (drop indices that have
a conflict), or prefer_[tribeName] to prefer the index from a specific tribe.

The tribe node starts a node client for each listed cluster. The following
configuration options are passed down from the tribe node to each node client:

node.name (used to derive the node.name for each node client)

network.host

network.bind_host

network.publish_host

transport.host

transport.bind_host

transport.publish_host

path.home

path.conf

path.logs

path.scripts

shield.*

Almost any setting (except for path.*) may be configured at the node client
level itself, in which case it will override any passed through setting from
the tribe node. Settings you may want to set at the node client level
include: